TheLinharts

Happy New Year! I wanted to do a quick recap of the end of last year. We are still coming down from all of our holiday fun.

We had lots of fun decorating (and snacking on) or gingerbread village! It was quite a masterpiece :)

Caleb has taken up cooking...here is one of the latest menu items: yum!

Playing "cowboys"

As usual, these two crazies have caused a few mishaps. For example, when Caleb "cooked" a tortilla in the microwave for 6 minutes. By the time I noticed, all I could see was black smoke billowing out of the microwave. I opened up the microwave to find a large black bubble (formerly the tortilla). I then immediately opened the windows and door and began fanning to avoid the smoke alarms going off. (I may or may not have yelled at the kids to fan the smoke too :) So in the midst of me throwing open the windows, my Willow Tree figurine that sits on the windowsill "flew" off and lost her head in the tumble.

The victim:

Like Dan and I always say, "we just can't have nice things" lol. So I got out my new bottle of superglue (target dollar-bin score!). But when I opened it up, it squirted out all over my countertops (that doesn't come off, FYI). Then Ellie came running around the corner and stopped dead in her tracks and started crying that there was something really sticky on her foot. Yep, huge glob of superglue on the floor was now stuck to her foot. Niiiice.... All in the name of a warm tortilla.

...or the time when the kids were playing "drums" on the dining room table with metal spoons...

...or when I let the kids take a glow stick to bed and Caleb bit it...the glowy juice went all over his jammies, his mouth, and his bed. After the initial freak out and verifying that it was non toxic, I went in his room (where the lights were off) and you could see that his mouth, bedspread, and jammies were glowing neon green...all night long

Let's start with Thanksgiving festivities-

Just before Thanksgiving, we got to meet our sweet Nephew Beckett!! He's super-precious :)

Thanksgiving: We had a lovely lunch at Grandma Dixie's

Grandpa Charles joined us, too. 4 generations represented here!

Then we went to Aunt Jan and Uncle Don's for some more feasting! We got to see Grandpa Mike, and Kim and Dustin, too!

We had some really sweet times with our KC friends leading up to Christmas.

We had dinner with these friends:

And Tim and Jo invited us to join their family for a night of caroling and sleigh riding (with real horses and bells and lights and treats and santa and all things wonderful!)

We headed to the kids' preschool for the annual Christmas Open House:

These are a couple of the lovely ladies that spoil our little William with love every week! As you can tell, he adores them:

Miss "Ant" craft time! Christmas is not complete without reindeer puppets with leg-warmers!

A little facepainting and balloon art by the elves:

We packed up and headed to Wichita for Christmas and the kids got to see their uncles!

They scored some pretty sweet gifts, including these headphones!

Caleb rocking out as usual:

We took a field trip to Exploration Place and the kids LOVED it-

Piloting the plane..

Medieval time out:

Will's favorite toy-

Then we headed to Emporia for more fun! The kids had their first bowling experience:

Cousin time!!

"The Night Before Christmas" story time with Grandpa!

Cookies for Santa- Oreos, of course!

Yep, he came! In fact, Caleb was so excited that he woke up at 5am, ran downstairs to check, then proceeded to wake us up by whispering (by "whisper" I mean shouting in a whisper voice) "Dad! Santa came!"

Snowball fight w/ Grandpa!

With Great Granpa Coburn

Santa attempt 2012:

Santa looking at their Christmas list...

He said, "is this really your list?" Caleb had this written on his: "The Eagles-Greatest Hits, Eddie and the Cruisers II- Eddie lives, and Lionel Richie- Tuskeegee" HAHA...seriously